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I hope not - and I know how badly the media can mangle the real message of what people say by selective quoting...

DNA database chaos with 500,000 false or misspelt entries - Independent Online Edition > UK Politics:

Lynne Featherstone, the Liberal Democrat MP for Hornsey and Wood Green, called for an urgent investigation and questioned why so much inaccurate information was on the system.

"If the database is to be of any use, then it has to be accurate. DNA data is open to abuse and this could allow people who mean no good to do no good. The more failsafe the police regard DNA, the easier it is to set someone up," she said.

This database, accurate or not, is open to abuse. The way the data is collected is abhorrent, from children and uncharged adults who have likely done nothing wrong or where the evidence has not been able to show they have done anything wrong. Our message is that it should be scrapped. Not merely tidied up.

Our DNA is part of us as individuals. Holding samples of it is false imprisonment. It should be subject to habeas corpus. There can be no truck with this illiberal nonsense.

Again from The Register: Government mulls mind expanding drugs, man

Government mulls mind expanding drugs, man

Soma time
By Chris Williams
Published Monday 5th June 2006 11:25 GMT
Find your perfect job - click here for thousands of tech vacancies.

New Labour's top science advisor has told government a new generation of brain function-enhancing pharmaceuticals are set to change how people live their lives over the next 20 years.

In a presentation to ministers at Downing Street, Sir David King said “recreational psychoactive substances” will be used by healthy people to improve their cognitive abilities, The Sunday Times reports.

Just what is "new generation" about this? And what is "brain function-enhancing"? Half a million clubbers a week apparently take one or two pills to enhance the sensitivity of their snog receptors. Or maybe the sort of brain function-enhancing that gave us Alice in Wonderland and Sherlock Holmes? Or that great DFD (Debate Function Disinhibitor) Tetrahydrocannabinol? Whilst millions' of eyes are opened to appreciate true beauty after a few shots of good old alcohol.

Better the devils we know, I say...:)

Technorati Tags: drugs laws

Whilst I accept that some of the Clarkson protestors objected because they think he’s a boor with a (deliciously) “un-PC” sense of humour, the main concern appeared to be his supposed environmental record.

In this respect, it’s the environmentalist lobby (I rather like Clarkson’s own word, “eco-mental”), that has it dangerously wrong. It is not the search for quality, for fun, for pushing technology to the limits that is the environmental culprit. But the economic system that continually forces more vehicles on the roads travelling further and further.

The traditional green response to “too many cars” seems to be to get people on buses, bikes, anything but cars. And on a small, localised scale, this may be superficially right. Congestion makes our towns seem as if they are choking.

Rather, we must ask why people need to hurtle around day after day and resolve pressures that will add to this. They are pretty fundamental economic questions.

For example, we are, in the developed world, the wealthiest we have ever been. And yet we are about to tell people they need to work for an extra five years at least to be able to afford to retire. That’s an additional 10%+ of rush hour traffic.

The amount of debt-money swilling around our system means that for much of our working lives we work two days a week for the government and one for the bankers, before we ever get to work for our own financial security. Solve that and we could finally see those 30-year old predictions of life in the 21st century, of 70% leisure time and such like, fulfilled.

Each working person in the country is permanently slaving to pay the interest on around £50,000 of systemic debt. Not necessarily their debt, but the trickle-down effects of corporate and government borrowing on top of personal borrowing.

25% of road haulage is just keeping the haulage industry moving – fuel, parts etc. 30% of all transport is shunting food ever increasing distances around the planet. Raw cotton, subsidised in the US, is flown to China and India before arriving here as £2 tee-shirts – all barmy, with diminishing returns and frightening consequences.

Take all that unnecessary debt-fuelled traffic off the roads and we’ll find we can respect the planet and still have fun with Ferraris.

Last week Vince Cable seems to have unilaterally added to Lib Dem tax plans in response to repeated more-heat-than-lght stories in the media about private equity bosses and their tax treatment, "non-domiciles" and their property in the UK going untaxed and the continued cris de coeur of middle England against Inheritance Taxes on their homes. Later in the week it seems George Osborne joined in, on what must be pretty unfamiliar Tory territory.

And then yesterday there was a story on the BBC about how buy-to-let property owners are able to avoid up to £2bn in taxes by offsetting their mortgage interest against their rental income before tax.

This seems to me to be something of an unhealthy return to the politics of envy, where the only question the taxman asks is "how much have you got?" As I wrote last week at the 1909 Group website, our Liberal forebears wanted to change that attitude. They realised that "equity" in the tax system was not solely a question of how much someone has, but just as importantly of how they got that wealth. Whether it was through healthy economic processes, creating new wealth, or by exploiting such things as protectionist policies, negative externalities or land and other natural monopolies.

Take supermarkets as an example. Private Equity firms have been circling Sainsbury's recently. Though they may have been seen off by other investors such as Robert Tchenguiz, he himself, a noted property tycoon, said he was investing in a "property company with a retain business". Indeed, with a Stock Market capitalization of £8.7bn, estimates value their property estate at more like £10bn - more than the whole business! If someone were to take over Sainsbury's they would not be creating new wealth but releasing the embodied profit of land ownership.

Many new entrepreneurs are basically leveraging land values to make a killing, hiding behind diverse operating businesses. INTO University Partnerships is an international English Language teaching business, but the partnership deals it forges with universities all seem to revolve around land acquisition and becoming a successful and profitable landlord to the students it brings from all corners of the planet. Last year, the HBOS banking group attempted to become a major player in the UK house building industry, pipped by Barratts in a contested bid for what had been the fifth largest house builder - this last is a double whammy - not only do they get to build your home, and capture the land value profit for themselves, but they get to charge you for borrowing the money to pay them for that land!

As to "non-doms" why should only they be penalised for owning property in the UK? Why not a land tax that would fall on everyone regardless of domicile status and instead of income and other capital taxes, including the hated Inheritance Tax? The non-doms would not be able to avoid it - and neither, incidentally, would the company involved in the outsourcing of the HM Revenue & Customs property estate, Mapeley, who subsequently off-shored the ownership of the property to avoid any taxes on it.

Anyway, the point is there are ways of making a tax system which is fair and equitable, that is not complicated, and doesn't seek to fleece people just because they have made money, but on the basis of how they make that money, and where that wealth is accumulated by processes like land ownership, where the value is created not by themselves but by others' need for their monopoly locations, they will be taxed the most, automatically, and according to market valuations not intrusive tax assessors. Land Value Tax.

Technorati Tags: vince cable, lib dems, tories, land value tax, Henry George, property tax, george osborne